Antaeus Orbiting Quarantine Facility (1978)

Our homeworld. Image: NASA

In the summer of 1978, 16 Faculty Fellows from universities around the U.S. met at NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Francisco to spend 10 weeks designing an Earth-orbiting Mars sample quarantine facility. It was one of a series of similar Ames-hosted Summer Faculty Design Studies conducted since the late 1960s. At the time, NASA actively considered Mars Sample Return (MSR) as a post-Viking mission. Agency interest flagged as it became clear that no such mission would receive funding, so publication of the 1978 design study, titled Orbiting Quarantine Facility: The Antaeus Report, was delayed until 1981.

The Ames Faculty Fellows noted that the three biology experiments on the Viking landers had found neither organic carbon nor clear evidence of ongoing metabolic processes in the soil they tested on Mars. Furthermore, the Viking cameras had observed no obvious signs of life at the two rather bland Viking landing sites. Nevertheless, the Fellows wrote, “the limitations of automated analysis” and the fact that “the landers sampled visually only a small fraction of one percent of the planet’s surface” meant that there could be “no real certainty” about whether Mars was lifeless. This, they argued, meant that, “in the event that samples of Martian soil are returned to Earth for study, special precautions ought to be taken to safeguard them. . .the samples should be considered to be potentially hazardous to terrestrial organisms until it has been conclusively shown that they are not.”

Their report listed three options for attempting to ensure that samples would not accidentally release martian organisms on Earth. The MSR spacecraft might sterilize the sample en route from Mars to Earth, perhaps by heating it. Alternately, the unsterilized sample might be quarantined in a “maximum containment” facility on Earth or in Earth orbit, outside our planet’s biosphere. The Fellows noted that each of these three options would have advantages and disadvantages; sterilizing the sample, for example, might ensure that no martian organisms could reach Earth, but would likely also damage the sample, diminishing its scientific utility. The Antaeus study emphasized the third option because it had not been studied in detail previously.

The Faculty Fellows explained the significance of the name they had selected for their Orbiting Quarantine Facility (OQF) project. Antaeus was a giant in Greek mythology who forced passing travelers to wrestle with him and killed them when he won. The Earth was the source of Antaeus’s power, so the hero Hercules was able to defeat the murderous giant by holding him above the ground. “Like Antaeus,” they explained, a martian organism “might thrive on contact with the terrestrial biosphere. By keeping the pathogen contained and distant, the proposed [OQF] would safeguard the Earth from possible contamination.”

The OQF would comprise five 4.1-meter-diameter cylindrical modules based on European Space Agency Spacelab hardware. The Fellows assumed that the modules and many of the other components needed to assemble and operate the OQF would become available during the 1980s as the Space Shuttle Program evolved into a Space Station Program.

Antaeus Orbiting Quarantine Facility. Image: NASA

Four Shuttle flights over two years would place OQF modules into a 296-kilometer-high circular orbit about the Earth. OQF assembly would begin with launch of drum-shaped Docking and Logistics Modules in a Shuttle Orbiter’s cargo bay. The 2.3-ton Docking Module, the OQF’s backbone, would measure 4.3 meters long and would include six 1.3-meter-diameter ports with docking units derived from the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz “international” design. This included outward-splayed guide “petals” and a system of shock absorbers and latches that would permit two identical docking units to link together. Logistics, Power, Habitation, and Laboratory Modules would link up with four of the ports to form a “pinwheel” design. The remaining two ports would enable Shuttle dockings, spacewalks outside the OQF with the Docking Module serving as an airlock, and attachment of additional modules as necessary.

The 4.3-meter-long Logistics Module would weigh 4.5 tons loaded with a one-month supply of air, water, food, and other supplies. After a crew boarded the OQF, a Shuttle Orbiter would arrive each month with a fresh Logistics Module. Using the Orbiter’s twin robot arms, the Space Shuttle crew would remove the spent Logistics Module for return to Earth and berth the fresh one in its place.

On the second OQF assembly flight, the Shuttle crew would link the 13.6-ton Power Module to the Docking Module’s aft port. The Power Module would then extend two steerable solar arrays capable of generating between 25 and 35 kilowatts of electricity. Spinning momentum wheels in the Power Module would provide OQF attitude control and small rockets would fire periodically to counter the effects of atmospheric drag on the quarantine station’s orbital altitude. The Power Module would also provide OQF thermal control and communications.

The OQF’s five-person crew would live in the 12.4-meter-long, 13.6-ton Habitation Module, which would arrive on the third assembly flight. The OQF’s “command console,” five crew sleep compartments, and workshop, sickbay, galley, exercise, and waste management/hygiene compartments would be arranged along a central aisle. The Hab Module would provide life support for all the OQF’s modules except the Laboratory Module.

Antaeus OQF Lab Module. Image: NASA

The Lab Module, delivered during the fourth assembly flight, would measure 6.9 meters long and, like the Habitation and Power Modules, would weigh 13.6 tons. Not surprisingly, the Ames Faculty Fellows devoted an entire chapter of the Antaeus report to the lab. Spacelab modules have a central corridor running their entire length with experiment equipment lining the walls; the OQF Lab Module, by contrast, would have a central experiment area running most of its length with corridors along the walls. Most of the experiment area would be contained within glass-walled “high-hazard” “Class III” biological containment cabinets similar to those at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. Analysis equipment within the cabinets would include a refrigerator, a freezer, a centrifuge, an autoclave, a gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, incubation and metabolic chambers, scanning electron and compound light microscopes, and challenge culture plates. The crew would operate the equipment using mechanical arms.

The Lab Module would also include an independent life support system with “high efficiency particle accumulator” (HEPA) filters. Experimenters would enter the Lab Module through a decontamination area, where they would don respirator masks and protective clothing. If a mishap contaminated the Lab Module, the module could be detached from the OQF and boosted to a long-lived 8000-kilometer circular orbit using a Laboratory Abort Propulsion Kit delivered by a Shuttle Orbiter.

Following the two-year assembly period, a rehearsal crew would board the OQF to test its systems and try out the Mars sample analysis protocol using samples from Earth. The Faculty Fellows set aside up to two years for these preparatory activities. At about the time the rehearsal crew boarded the OQF, the robotic MSR spacecraft would depart Earth on a one-year journey to Mars.

Two years later, about four years after the start of OQF assembly, a small Mars Sample Return Vehicle (MSRV) containing one kilogram of martian surface material and air samples would arrive in high-Earth orbit. The sample would ride within a sample canister, the exterior of which would have been sterilized during Mars-Earth transfer. Meanwhile, a Space Shuttle would deliver to the OQF a five-person sample analysis crew consisting of a commander (a career astronaut with engineering training) and four scientists with clinical research experience (a medical doctor, a geobiologist, a biochemist, and a biologist).

A Shuttle-launched remote-controlled Space Tug would collect the sample canister from high-Earth orbit and deliver it to a “docking cone” on the side of the Lab Module. The canister would enter the experiment area through a small airlock. The sample analysis crew would then open it using “a mechanism similar to a can opener.” They would immediately place 900 grams of the sample into “pristine storage.” Over the next 60 days, they would execute an analysis protocol that would expend 100 grams of the sample. Twelve grams each would be devoted to microbiological culturing and challenge cultures containing living cells from more than 100 Earth species, six grams each to metabolic tests and microscopic inspection for living cells and fossils, 10 grams to chemical analysis, and 54 grams to “second-order” follow-up tests.

If the 60-day analysis protocol yielded no signs of life in the test sample, a Shuttle Orbiter would carry the pristine sample from the OQF to Earth’s surface for distribution to laboratories around the world. Based on highly optimistic 1970s NASA estimates of Shuttle, Spacelab, and Station costs, the report placed the total cost of OQF construction and operations at only $1.66 billion for this “minimum scenario.” If, on the other hand, life were detected in the Mars samples, then analysis on board the OQF could be extended for up to six and a half years, with Shuttles providing logistics resupply and periodic crew rotation throughout. The cost of this “maximum scenario” could reach $2.2 billion, the Ames Faculty Fellows estimated.